6 Samsung Gallery features you didn't know your Galaxy phone had

Google Photos is preinstalled on phones from a ton of manufacturers today, and it offers convenient backup functionality and loads of features. However, the Samsung Gallery app makes a strong argument for being the best gallery app from an Android brand today.

If you have a Samsung phone, the built-in Gallery offers a variety of features, such as object erasing, GIF and collage creation, and optical character recognition. In fact, it offers so many features that there might be a few that you didn’t know about. So here are some of the little-known Samsung Gallery features that may have gone under your radar.

1. Reflection removal

Samsung wasn’t the first to offer reflection removal, as that honor goes to HUAWEI in 2020. Nevertheless, this capability has been available on Samsung flagship phones since 2022’s Galaxy S22 series. And it does exactly what you think.

The Gallery can either prompt you to remove reflections from a photo or you can manually do this via Edit > three-dot menu > Object Eraser > Erase Reflections. It’s not perfect, though, as it seems to make the sun disappear in the “after” picture above. The reflections aren’t actually removed, either, as Samsung seems to apply aggressive contrast adjustments to reduce their visibility instead. Nevertheless, this is still useful if you’re taking a photo through a window (e.g., an office window, an airplane window, or a display cabinet).

2. Spot Color

I love the Spot Color (or Color Pop) functionality seen on some smartphones. This lets you take monochrome photos and then add individual colors back into the image. The biggest downside to this feature on the likes of Motorola phones is that you have to shoot in a dedicated mode first. That means you can’t use this on your old images. Fortunately, Samsung offers a better approach with this little-known Gallery feature.

Spot Color in Samsung Gallery works for any photo. Simply tap Edit > three-dot menu > Spot Color, and your photo will be turned into a monochrome picture. From here, you can choose to add more colors or remove them. Either way, this feature can deliver some stylish shots.

3. Colorization

Staying with color-related capabilities, one of the more recent Samsung Gallery features is colorization. This uses AI smarts to add color back to your monochrome photos. It’s handy if you’ve got a bunch of old black-and-white photos that you’ve snapped or scanned with your phone, such as old family snaps.

The feature arrived on Galaxy flagships as part of the Galaxy AI suite of capabilities and can be accessed by swiping up on a black-and-white photo and tapping the “colorize” button. We thought the colorization feature was very hit-and-miss when we tried it out earlier this year, but it does a solid job colorizing photos of people.

4. Long Exposure photos after the fact

Many Android phones offer a dedicated long-exposure mode or let you use manual mode to capture long-exposure shots. But one of the more convenient yet little-known Samsung Gallery features is the ability to capture long-exposure shots after the fact.

This feature, which first debuted on iPhones, only works with photos that have Motion Photos enabled. All you need to do is swipe up from the bottom or tap the “i” button to show the information panel. From here, tap the “Long exposure” button to create a long-exposure picture. You can likely get higher-quality results with a tripod and manual mode, but this is still a neat, time-saving addition. (And yes, I’m not a big fan of this fan shot, but this is the sample I could get out now.)

5. Samsung Gallery Labs

Did you know the Samsung Gallery has a hidden Labs menu? You can activate this menu by tapping Settings > About and repeatedly tapping the version number until the app says Samsung Gallery Labs is enabled. So, what can you find in this settings menu?

Samsung Gallery Labs offers a few experimental toggles and features. These include the option to save specific JPEGs as PDFs, play the next video automatically, and a filmstrip UI for faster scrolling through photos. None of these features are huge additions to the app, but they’re still nifty anyway.

6. Removing the moire effect

Have you ever taken a photo of a monitor or TV and seen a visually unpleasant pattern of lines in the picture? That’s the moire effect in action. This is an annoying, distracting visual artifact akin to a screen door, but one of the most underrated Samsung Gallery features is moire removal.

When Gallery detects the moire effect in an affected photo, it lets you remove it by swiping up on the relevant image (or tapping the “i” button) and then pressing the “remove moire” button which automatically appears. Don’t have this option on your Galaxy phone? Then you can download the Galaxy Enhance-X app, which debuted this tool. The difference is sometimes impressive and sometimes so-so, though, as seen in the two galleries above.